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Silk’s unique properties help stabilize vaccines

In this week’s Medical Discovery News by UTMB’s David Niesel and Norbert Herzog: If vaccines did not need to be refrigerated, they would be more accessible during natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes and easier to use in developing countries. In industrialized countries, almost half of all vaccines are rendered unusable because they have not been kept at cold temperatures, which results in them losing potency. But researchers may have found the answer to this dilemma in a surprising source. A team at Tufts University found that encasing vaccines or other therapeutic drugs in silk prevents them from being affected by changes in temperature.